Mark Zuckerberg is dictator of the world’s largest nation, says Pirate Bay co-founder

Peter Sunde is one of the people you’d least likely expect to call Mark Zuckerberg the dictator of the world’s largest nation. But that’s exactly what the co-founder of The Pirate Bay told CNBC at an interview in Amsterdam. Sunde and his partners were famously ruled guilty of assisting copyright infringement in 2009 and ordered to pay $3,620,000 in damages to the affected parties.

Many were of the opinion that the decision was not fair since the founders are not responsible for how people end up using The Pirate Bay’s file-sharing ability. It’s another topic of discussion altogether. Sunde is currently in the news for labeling Mark Zuckerberg the dictator of the biggest nation in the world – Facebook – in spite of the fact that entire teams of experts drive the functionality of the social networking site.

Sunde laments that democracy is dead online and opting out of Facebook has real world implications. According to him, not being on Facebook means people stop socializing with you offline and you don’t get party invites or updates from friends. Call us snobs; but being able to avoid weddings and birthdays of folks who couldn’t be troubled to contact us directly (just in case we were on a break from Facebook) has been positively life-changing.

“We censor a lot of things, why not censor Facebook?”

Another thing that bothers The Pirate Bay co-founder is how politicians treat Zuckerberg. He highlights the time German Chancellor Angela Merkel asked Zuckerberg at a UN luncheon if the company was working on erasing anti-immigration opinions expressed on the social networking platform. Sunde questions why Facebook should not be banned from operating in countries which find it guilty of disobeying the rules of that particular territory.

As if censoring anything on one website is a guaranteed way to make it disappear from the Internet. Sunde should know better than that. Of course, these remarks come close on the heels of the Trending Topics controversy which was seen making the headlines recently. Unnamed ex-curators of Facebook’s trending news section were allegedly asked to suppress conservative/right wing stories and inject certain popular topics into said hub.

Mark Zuckerberg was quick to refute the report while insisting that there’s no evidence to back such accusations. But the issue has again roused fears of the power companies like Facebook and Google can wield when it comes to influencing the politics of a nation. Perhaps Sunde’s outburst is an emotionally charged reflection of the times we live in.